Fiscal Year 2025’s National Defense Authorization Act’s Senate version contains an important item that is being ignored—young women between the ages of 18-26 will be automatically registered for the draft.

Previously, the House version of the NDAA passed (217-199) on June 14 and provisioned for the automatic registration of 18-26 year old men for the draft, but there was no item extending the order to women.

As it stands, all men of age are legally required to register for the draft when they turn 18, and most states automatically register them upon getting a driver’s permit, license, renewal of the same, or state ID. Many states also tie registration to access to state largess such as student loans under legislation mirroring the federal Solomon Amendment, or state jobs, similar to the federal Thurmond Amendment.

However, states like California, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington, and Wyoming which do not have automatic registration policies would have their relatively lenient laws on registration made irrelevant by the federal government. If this bill becomes law, automatic registration for the draft would be the law of the land in every State, not just for men, but for women as well.

Soldiering as Labor

By its very nature, soldiering is resistant to comparisons with other jobs, but for the purpose of analysis, one must look past the unique aspects of the military (i.e., risk of grievous injury or death, camaraderie, etc.) to see it as a position of gainful employment.

When someone is hired as an employee, what does this signal? First, it shows that men are not purely generalists but instead specialists, and that tasks can be better completed when subdivided. Second, it shows that the state after the task is completed is preferable to both parties than before it.

For the employee, this is because he is paid for his efforts, for the employer, because the task was completed. The actual job contract is lastly a voluntary, mutual statement that the situation after the labor is preferable to the one before it, and it regularizes the exchange of labor for money.

Distilling this definition, a job is specialist position that has inherent disutility, but produces an end state which is more highly-valued both because of the employee’s prospective remuneration and the employer’s task completion, in such a way that makes both better off. Thus it is voluntarily assented to by both parties.

How does soldiering fit into this rubric? It has inherent disutility; harsh military discipline and the possibility of death are certainly classed as negatives. The Austrian School insight that value is subjective holds and thus is non-experimental beyond the inference that because some men hire soldiers and some men volunteer to fill the role, he who voluntarily joins a military sees the subsequent state as superior to his current. The place where soldiering can, and often does, diverge from the above analysis of a principal-agent problem has to do with the concept of whether it is voluntary.

When men are drafted into the military, they are still laboring, but unlike a regular job, the labor is not voluntary, making the draft by definition, involuntary labor.

Soldiering as Coercion

Seeing that the draft is involuntary labor, the question becomes how it is enforced and what does this mean. Involuntary labor requires some sort of enforcement mechanism to induce the victim to carry out the labor, otherwise he would balk at the suggestion to act against his own interests.

Only the entities that can use force can make men act against their interests, and this principally refers to the state—nothing else could cast such a wide net and enforce such a draconian policy that could never stand in a stateless society.

Indeed, the draft shows the state in its true form, moving men around like so many chess pieces and disregarding their own visions, preferences, and individual rights. If the state is powerful enough to dragoon men away from their families and career and put them in uniform to fight a foreign war, then the state has grown to be omnipotent.

Is this any way to run a free nation?

The Meaning of the Legislation and its Impact

Conscription deserves to be condemned on the grounds of its implication about the relationship between man and state alone, but this legislation moving through the legislature does something unique which makes it particularly odious. In the past, the specter of conscription hung only over men, but the egalitarian impulse has advanced so far that the taboo against dragooning America’s daughters into the trenches has withered away.

If liberty is to be threatened with destruction as conscription does (a man who perishes in a foreign field has little liberty indeed), it is better that fewer are under threat than more, and this legislation threatens to universalize the Sword of Damocles hanging above the head of every young man in America.

By automatically registering all young people for conscription, the state also deepens its well of manpower and increases its war-making potential for indeed, a state with more manpower to burn in war will be less likely to steward it.

After all, it was Jörg Guido Hülsmann who wrote: “Freed from the need to serve consumers as efficiently as possible, the producers of defense services [the state] now have a bigger margin for wasteful behavior. The institution of conscription has particularly negative effects since it encourages military leaders to expose their troops to unnecessary danger.” Conscription thus makes war more likely and soldiers more disposable.

It is rarely contended that the soldier is unnecessary to the security of a free people while the threat of predation from other states remains so potent, and such could not be farther from the current contention. What is argued is that the draft is fundamentally anti-soldier.

To best support the men and women who choose to be soldiers, one must respect their liberties as humans and not trample them underfoot with conscription. Opponents of the draft have often been seen as hateful towards soldiers, but this is a mischaracterization. The former are the ones who are most concerned for liberties of all humans, soldiers very much included.

If the military needs manpower, let them attract it the way other employers do—with benefits and good pay, or at least with a sense of purpose—and not resort to 21st century shanghaiing.

Originally Posted at https://mises.org/

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“It says here in this history book that, luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?” – ~Norm MacDonald

A segment of Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Darryl Cooper is making the rounds on social media. Cooper questioned Winston Churchill’s hero status, which is a big no-no, especially among conservatives. The accepted view is that World War II can be reduced to the good guys versus the bad guys and that Churchill is the one who bravely convinced the good guys to go to war against the bad guys.

Cooper suggests that Churchill’s legacy is more complicated. According to Cooper, Churchill “kept this war going, and he had no way to go back and fight this war. All he had were bombers. He was literally, by 1940, sending firebombing fleets to go firebomb the Black Forest, just to burn down sections of the Black Forest—just rank terrorism.” He “carpet-bombed civilian neighborhoods, the purpose of which was to kill as many civilians as possible.” Churchill’s goal was to prolong and intensify the war so that the United States and the Soviet Union would enter the conflict.

This segment has received predictable levels of apoplectic backlash. In this article, I only want to address Churchill’s hero status. This is a great opportunity to revisit Ralph Raico’s Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal, and especially his chapter, “Rethinking Churchill.”

Raico began by acknowledging the mythology surrounding Churchill. It makes sense for Churchill to be elevated as “Man of the Century,” since the twentieth century is “the century of the State—of the rise and hypertrophic growth of the welfare-warfare state—and Churchill was from first to last a Man of the State.”

Also near the beginning of the chapter, Raico gives some hints of Churchill’s major crimes. Churchill resuscitated a war that had already effectively ended in 1940, and maintained offensive civilian bombing operations even though “there was little real threat of a German invasion.” But before getting into these details, Raico discussed Churchill’s career-long opportunism and obsession with war.

Churchill changed his party affiliation twice, flip-flopped on tariffs, and changed his tune regarding socialism as well: “He attacked socialism before and after World War I, while during the War he promoted war socialism, calling for nationalization of the railroads, and declaring in a speech: ‘Our whole nation must be organized, must be socialized if you like the word.’” Churchill was Hayekian when running against the Labour Party in 1945, but a Keynesian when, in 1943, he “accepted the Beveridge plans for the post-war welfare state and Keynesian management of the economy.” He hated communism but was fond of Stalin—Churchill “welcomed him as an ally, embraced him as a friend […] as late as the Potsdam conference, he repeatedly announced, of Stalin: ‘I like that man.’” Churchill even helped cover up Soviet war crimes in Poland.

Raico claimed that the one constant in Churchill’s life was his love of war. Raico, like Cooper, mentioned Churchill’s beloved toy soldiers. (Cooper said that Churchill continued to play with them even as an adult.) Regarding WWI, Churchill said, “I know this war is smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment—and yet—I cannot help it—I love every second I live.” Churchill said he “loved the bangs,” that “the story of the human race is war,” and that peace is “bland.” Raico concludes “All his life he was most excited—on the evidence, only really excited—by war. He loved war as few modern men ever have.”

If “war is the health of the state,” and Churchill loved war, then it makes sense that Churchill wanted a big, activist, central-planning welfare state. Before his appointment as Lord of the Admiralty, Prime Minister Asquith installed Churchill as president of the Board of Trade. Raico shows that in this position, “Churchill was one of the chief pioneers of the welfare state in Britain.” Churchill admired the Bismarkian social insurance programs in Germany, he believed in “collectivist social policy,” and he said that “the nation demands the application of drastic corrective and curative processes.” Nothing was out of bounds for the state—as Raico summarizes: “The state was to acquire canals and railroads, develop certain national industries, provide vastly augmented education, introduce the eight-hour work day, levy progressive taxes, and guarantee a national minimum living standard.” Why isn’t Churchill the hero of the left?

As First Lord of the Admiralty, “Churchill was the only member of the cabinet who backed war [WWI] from the start, with all of his accustomed energy.” Prime Minister Asquith wrote “Winston very bellicose and demanding immediate mobilization…. Winston, who has got all his war paint on, is longing for a sea fight in the early hours of the morning to result in the sinking of the [German warship] Goeben. The whole thing fills me with sadness.” Churchill skirted the Cabinet when he ordered the British navy to sail at night in waters with the intention to provoke war with Germany.

Once the war started (which filled Churchill with “glowing zest,” according to Lady Violet Asquith), Churchill oversaw the illegal hunger blockade of Germany. Raico points out that

About 750,000 German civilians succumbed to hunger and diseases caused by malnutrition. The effect on those who survived was perhaps just as frightful in its own way. A historian of the blockade concluded: “the victimized youth [of World War I] were to become the most radical adherents of National Socialism.” It was also complications arising from the British blockade that eventually provided the pretext for Wilson’s decision to go to war in 1917.

Churchill, therefore, was instrumental in starting WWI and paving the way to WWII. While the circumstances surrounding the sinking of the Lusitania are unclear, Raico concludes that “what is certain is that Churchill’s policies made the sinking very likely. Raico includes evidence brought to light by historian Patrick Beesly, who was “reluctantly driven to the conclusion that there was a conspiracy deliberately to put the Lusitania at risk in the hope that even an abortive attack on her would bring the United States into the war. Such a conspiracy could not have been put into effect without Winston Churchill’s express permission and approval.”

Between the wars, Churchill’s rhetoric defied “the modern mythology” surrounding Churchill. The accepted view is that Churchill was squarely focused on Germany as a threat, but in 1937 he admitted,

Three or four years ago I was myself a loud alarmist. . . . In spite of the risks which wait on prophecy, I declare my belief that a major war is not imminent, and I still believe that there is a good chance of no major war taking place in our lifetime.

Perhaps Churchill was trying to save his reputation. He had become known as a Chicken Little, always warning of existential threats around the world. Raico notes that people had stopped listening to Churchill—“he had tried to whip up hysteria too often before.” Raico also quotes “an ardent Churchill sympathizer” who reluctantly admitted that Churchill was no “angel of light”:

The time is long past when it was possible to see the protracted debate over British foreign policy in the 1930s as a struggle between Churchill, an angel of light, fighting against the velleities of uncomprehending and feeble men in high places. It is reasonably well-known today that Churchill was often ill-informed, that his claims about German strength were exaggerated and his prescriptions impractical, that his emphasis on air power was misplaced.

Raico finally arrives at “the great war crime” that was briefly discussed by Cooper and Carlson: “the terror-bombing of the cities of Germany that in the end cost the lives of around 600,000 civilians and left some 800,000 seriously injured.” Later, Churchill lied in his remarks to the House of Commons, claiming “that only military and industrial installations were targeted.” But the directive to the Bomber Command was “focused on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular of the industrial workers.” And “The chief of the Air Staff added: ‘Ref the new bombing directive: I suppose it is clear that the aiming points are to be the built-up areas, not, for instance, the dockyards or aircraft factories.’”

The bombing of Dresden finally elicited public outcry, forcing Churchill to say to his staff, “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed.” According to Raico,

The military chiefs saw through Churchill’s cowardly ploy: realizing that they were being set up, they refused to accept the memorandum. After the war, Churchill casually disclaimed any knowledge of the Dresden bombing, saying: “I thought the Americans did it.”

And still the bombing continued.

This brief summary of Raico’s “Rethinking Churchill” only scratches the surface. In this one chapter, Raico demolishes the Churchill myth, including 176 footnotes containing citations to evidence and corroborating accounts from historians, many of whom only reluctantly admit to Churchill’s flaws and crimes. Despite the accepted view of Churchill as hero, Raico concludes, “that, when all is said and done, Winston Churchill was a Man of Blood and a politico without principle, whose apotheosis serves to corrupt every standard of honesty and morality in politics and history.”

Image credit: (Public domain) Imperial War Museum, via wikimedia.

Originally Posted at https://mises.org/

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Two weeks ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspended his campaign for president. In his nearly hour-long speech explaining the decision, Kennedy highlighted what he sees as the three biggest issues facing the United States. The first two—the threat to free speech and the danger of the war in Ukraine—are familiar to anyone following the daily political fights happening online and in the traditional media.

But when Kennedy got to his third concern, it was striking how absent any discussion of it has been from our hyper-active national discourse. The issue was the scale of chronic disease affecting the American population and, especially, American children. Kennedy explicitly called this “the most important issue” and, as he laid out the scale of the problem, it’s easy to see why he feels that way.

As Kennedy said in the speech, two-thirds—or around 222 million Americans—suffer from chronic health issues. In the 1970s, the rate was lower than one percent. On top of that, nearly three out of every four Americans are now overweight or obese, and the childhood obesity rate stands at 50%.

There has been an explosion in diabetes in both kids and adults, as well as neurological illnesses and disorders like Alzheimer’s and autism. Kennedy also highlighted the sharp increase we’re seeing in food allergies, ADHD, and cancer, among others. His point is that, at the same time Americans are paying more for healthcare than the populations of nearly every other country, we are also quickly becoming the sickest.

What’s astonishing about all of this is that almost nobody denies the health emergency Kennedy lays out. Some argue that he is exaggerating a few of his numbers slightly or is misleading people with some rates of increase that are inflated by changes in how chronic diseases are defined and screened—something Kennedy and those he cites claim to have corrected for. But most of Kennedy’s critics in the media simply ignore what he says about this topic.

So, if the scale of the problem is this extreme and its existence is not controversial, why is this not the central issue in every national election? Simply put, because the chronic disease epidemic is making the political class absurdly rich.

In many ways, the problem has its roots in the Progressive Era at the end of the 1800s. At the time, there were several competing approaches to treating sick and ailing patients, each with its own network of doctors and professional associations. One such group was what their rivals called allopathic physicians. Their approach was to treat patients with painkillers and other drugs aimed specifically at reducing patient suffering.

Of course, for certain ailments, that is a perfectly reasonable approach. And, as one of many available in the early healthcare market, it provided many Americans who required such an approach the care they needed. But in the early 1900s, the allopathic doctors’ professional group—the American Medical Association (AMA)—decided to get with the times and lobby the government for special privileges.

As Patrick Newman explained in a lecture based on a chapter from his upcoming book, the AMA maneuvered its way into setting the official accreditation standards for the nation’s medical schools. With that newfound power, the association was able to both greatly restrict the supply of doctors—by forcing half of the country’s medical schools to close—and to certify their allopathic approach as the preeminent, legitimate, government-recognized form of medical care.

And the AMA was not alone. In most industries, powerful corporations and professional associations realized they could make a lot more money if they lobbied the government for monopoly privileges, lucrative subsidies, and cartel-preserving supply quotas. Similar efforts in the food industry resulted in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and many so-called nutrition programs at universities with deep ties to the biggest food companies.

On the agricultural side, farming and meatpacking groups successfully lobbied for the creation of what would become the recurring five-year farm bill. This law contains a multitude of handouts and privileges for agricultural giants, such as supply restrictions that artificially raise the prices of some kinds of produce and subsidies that over-saturate the market with other crops and products.

Finally, drug manufacturers were able to get the government to criminalize competition in the pharmaceutical industry and to protect companies from liability for the side effects of many drugs. The government even mandates the purchase of some drugs with its immunization schedule—much of which is required to attend school.

Together, all these companies and interest groups use their government privileges to fill their pockets.

Big agricultural companies flood the market with highly subsidized crops which have alternative uses, like corn syrup and seed oils, that crowd out healthier options that consumers actually prefer. Food companies can then use these artificially cheap ingredients to produce highly addictive ultra-processed foods that their friends in the government and university nutrition programs then say are part of a healthy diet.

Americans, who are taught from a young age to trust the government and university-trained, state-licensed medical professionals, are easily hooked on these ultra-processed foods. That’s great for the food companies but terrible for our bodies. Many of the chronic diseases plaguing Americans can be drawn back to our consumption (or our parents’ consumption) of these addicting food-like substances.

But it doesn’t stop there. The flood of chronic illnesses caused by ultra-processed food is lucrative for the medical industry, whose allopathic approach ensures the root cause is never discussed, much less addressed, but is instead treated with a barrage of prescription drugs that solely attack the resulting symptoms. After all, addressing the root cause would be bad for the pharmaceutical industry’s bottom line. And doctors who don’t play along are systemically denied official, government-recognized credentials.

The extensive drug cocktail that most Americans are swallowing and injecting each day allows them to stay hooked on toxic foods that their bodies are trying to tell them are hurting them and, thanks to side effects, can even aggravate or cause other chronic diseases. The deadly cycle keeps accelerating and the large, politically-connected businesses in the agricultural, meatpacking, food processing, healthcare, and pharmaceutical industries grow absurdly rich.

But they’re not the only ones benefiting. Government bureaucrats enjoy an ever-increasing level of power and resources as companies lobby for them to intervene even more in their respective industries. Universities are gifted millions by food and drug companies to run friendly academic programs. And politicians get to appear heroic to both sides as they exploit how obviously awful the healthcare system is to fight distracting, meaningless battles over whether to cap the prices of a couple drugs—usually while pushing to send even more taxpayer money into the healthcare industry.

Government officials, industry insiders, and state-credentialed experts have nothing to gain and everything to lose by actually addressing our country’s health issue. That’s why there is no urgency, even in theatrical political fights, to talk about how sick Americans have gotten. As the problem worsens, however, it will be harder and harder to ignore.

Still, the path forward must start with rolling back the government policies and privileges that this massive, deadly racket is built upon. Because it is a grave mistake to rely on those benefiting from a problem to solve it.

Originally Posted at https://mises.org/

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Quarantine, lockdowns, social distancing—words I’m sure everyone reading never wants to hear again. Even several years removed, the pain inflicted by Covid-19 and subsequent policy reactions is still fresh in our collective consciousness. I wouldn’t blame anyone for wanting to forget the whole thing, and you wouldn’t be the only one. The authoritarians who violated your freedoms in the name of Covid safety would love for those years—and their mistakes—to be forgotten. As it happens, two of those authoritarians will be appearing together on ballots this November—Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

Kamala Harris is a familiar name to many Americans. Picked out by Biden to serve as vice president on the 2020 Democrat ticket, she has served the past three-and-a-half years as Biden’s second-in-command. Depending on the outcome of the presidential elections in November, she might even be getting a promotion. But in her capacity as VP, she has overseen the Biden administration’s increasingly tyrannical edicts in the name of stopping Covid.

In 2021, the Biden administration attempted to wield OSHA against the American people by requiring that any companies with over 100 employees require weekly testing or vaccination. Not only was the legal reasoning behind this mandate spurious, the actions being mandated had, at best, questionable efficacy in combating the “Omicron” Covid strain. Thankfully, the mandate was struck down in a 6-3 decision by the Supreme Court in 2022, but neither Biden nor anyone in his administration ever rescinded their support for the measure.

Additionally, the Biden administration took steps to censor anyone skeptical of their Covid policies by putting pressure on private companies. As revealed by the “Twitter Files,” the Biden administration would request that Twitter either ban or artificially reduce the reach of certain accounts. These included high-profile individuals, such as Robert Kennedy Jr. It was only after Elon Musk purchased Twitter that such government “requests” were disclosed to the public.

Vice President Harris has done more than look on with passive approval at the Biden administration’s actions. She has been actively involved in vaccination drives, encouraging masking, and imploring Americans to social distance. At a 2021 vaccine drive in South Carolina, Harris stated:

“So, the vaccines—let me say it again—are safe. They are safe. And they are free. And they are effective. And it is that simple.”

And, on the subject of “herd immunity”:

“If you are vaccinated, you are protected. If your community is vaccinated, Covid rates in your community will go down.”

Just a few months after these remarks, the Delta variant would crash through the United States, despite millions of Americans being vaccinated. The same would happen again in 2022, when the Omicron variant caused record-high numbers of Covid infections.

Harris also supported vaccines for children aged 5-11, despite the fact that young children are among the least likely to suffer serious complications from Covid. Even the World Health Organization would later reverse their position on child vaccination because of the marginal-to-nonexistent benefits.

In contrast to Harris, Tim Walz is an unfamiliar name to many. In 2018, Walz was elected governor of Minnesota, reelected in 2022, and is currently running with Harris for vice president. During Covid, he supported the same masking, lockdown, and social distancing policies that most governors across the country did, however, Walz’s administration was willing to go farther in these measures than many other governors.

After Walz issued a stay-at-home order to prevent the spread of Covid, he also established a “Covid hotline” where people could call and report anyone who wasn’t following the governor’s edicts. This caused no small amount of controversy within the state, but when Walz was asked about removing the hotline, he said, “We’re not going to take down a phone number that people can call to keep their families safe.”

Walz was perfectly willing to enforce his lockdown orders as well. Whenever a Lakeville restaurant tried to reopen for dine-in service, state attorney general Keith Ellison sought a restraining order to keep it closed. Gloating on the situation, Ellison said. “I’m gratified the court recognizes the severity of the pandemic and the need to take urgent action to stop the spread of Covid-19.”

In June 2020, Walz issued a mask mandate, requiring anyone in an indoor space with non-family members to wear a mask. In the official announcement of this mandate, Walz said, “But as Minnesotans always do during tough times, we come together and we take care of one another. And right now there’s no better way to demonstrate our Minnesotan values than by wearing a mask.”

We now know that almost all the measures supported by Harris and Walz were ineffective at stopping Covid. Vaccines needed boosters to maintain efficacy and had mixed results against subsequent Covid strains. The cloth masks that everyone wore for years didn’t work. The infamous six-feet of social distancing was completely arbitrary. Lockdowns had only a minimal impact on a state’s Covid performance (as Tom Woods can readily tell anyone).

But, of course, no apologies have been given and no retractions issued. As with every failure of state policy, we are expected to forget and move on. As time passes, and 2020-2022 fades in our memories, people do start to forget. Looking back on the madness of those years, it’s almost difficult to believe all of this actually happened. Not only did it happen but, if given the chance, it or similar could all happen again. The Harris/Walz ticket represents a lot of things, but foremost amongst them is the tyrannical Covid regime.

Originally Posted at https://mises.org/

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Libertarians understand — or should understand — that military conscription is a form of slavery or involuntary servitude. In fact, everyone should understand this. And yet conscription has been employed by the U.S. government for the past 161 years, ever since Abraham Lincoln signed the first federal conscription act into law in March 1863, enslaving thousands of American men.

For those who are killed in battle or executed for desertion, conscription is worse than slavery because it robs them of their very lives. To this day, one of the penalties for desertion in wartime is death. At various times in history the U.S. government has shot deserters in firing squads, and it has even imprisoned or shot civilian conscription protesters.

Even if one volunteers for the military, one immediately becomes a slave to the state because it is illegal to leave. The penalties for desertion apply to both volunteer recruits and conscripts. In “Desertion During the Civil War” historian Ella Lonn writes that after the conscription law was passed, draftees were held like “veritable prisoners … so as to prevent their untimely departure.” And there were many, many “untimely departures” from Lincoln’s army.

Examining “The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies,” Lonn documented that some 200,000 Northern men deserted from the Union army in 1862, about 14% of the entire army. More than 90,000 Northern men deserted on the eve of the Battle of Antietam, she wrote, and there were over 100,000 more deserters the rest of the year.

According to Lonn, a policy of mass execution of deserters was implemented after a Feb. 3, 1863, cabinet meeting because Gen. George Meade asked why the executions took so long. Lonn describes the execution method, which is documented in the “Official Records,” as follows: “A gallows and shooting ground were provided in each corps and scarcely a Friday passed during the winter of 1863–64 that some wretched deserter did not suffer the death penalty in the Army of the Potomac.”

Soldiers were forced to watch the daily executions of their friends and comrades: “The condemned men marched out between the two ranks of the regiment, preceded by the musicians, playing a funeral march. … The victim was conducted to the edge of the grave, which had already been dug. … He was seated, blindfolded, and placed upon a board at the foot of the open coffin, into which he fell backwards when the firing squad had discharged its duty.” Lonn adds that deserters were sometimes hanged, although shooting was the most common execution method.

Hence in the Civil War the precedent was established that all military personnel are slaves to the state in wartime and that death is the penalty for trying to escape from this form of slavery. Deserters weren’t physically punished for running away as chattel slaves were. They were killed.

In the New York City draft riots, which occurred a few days after the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, Lincoln sent some 15,000 troops from Gettysburg to New York City to enforce his new conscription law. Iver Bernstein, in his book “The New York City Draft Riots” details how the Gettysburg veteran “soldiers” fired indiscriminately into the crowds, killing hundreds of New Yorkers and maiming an untold number. Some historians have said the death count may have been in the thousands. All for protesting military conscription.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution clearly outlaws slavery and indentured servitude. That was swept aside during World War I when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the slavery of conscription was legal and constitutional after all because, in the opinion of the Wilson administration, it was “necessary and proper” for the war effort. This ruling was based on the necessary and proper clause of the Constitution, which was first used to pervert the true meaning of the document by Alexander Hamilton to push for the creation of a national bank. Yes, conscription is not one of the powers delegated to the federal government by the sovereign states, and it’s even outlawed by the Thirteenth Amendment, the ruling argues, but it is necessary and proper to have it anyway. Such is the Hamiltonian method of constitutional interpretation.

If the government can conscript you into its army, can cause your death or mutilation in some war that has nothing to do with national defense, and can execute you if you resist, then it can do anything to you at any time, for any reason — or without bothering to give a reason.

Originally Posted at https://mises.org/

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According to some “experts,” there is an urgent need to remove cash from the economy. It is held that cash provides support to the “shadow economy” and permits tax evasion. Another justification for its removal is that, in times of economic shocks, which push the economy into a recession, the run for cash exacerbates the downturn—it becomes a factor contributing to economic instability. Moreover, it is argued that, in the modern world, most transactions can be settled by means of electronic funds transfer. Money in the modern world is allegedly an abstraction.

The emergence of money

Money emerged because barter could not support the market economy. A butcher, who wanted to exchange his meat for fruit, might not be able to find a fruit farmer who wanted his meat, while the fruit farmer who wanted to exchange his fruit for shoes might not be able to find a shoemaker who wanted his fruit. The distinguishing characteristic of money is that it is the general medium of exchange. It has evolved as the most marketable commodity. On this process, Mises wrote,

“…there would be an inevitable tendency for the less marketable of the series of goods used as media of exchange to be one by one rejected until at last only a single commodity remained, which was universally employed as a medium of exchange; in a word, money.”

Similarly, Rothbard held that,

Just as in nature there is a great variety of skills and resources, so there is a variety in the marketability of goods. Some goods are more widely demanded than others, some are more divisible into smaller units without loss of value, some more durable over long periods of time, some more transportable over large distances. All of these advantages make for greater marketability. It is clear that in every society, the most marketable goods will be gradually selected as the media for exchange. As they are more and more selected as media, the demand for them increases because of this use, and so they become even more marketable. The result is a reinforcing spiral: more marketability causes wider use as a medium which causes more marketability, etc. Eventually, one or two commodities are used as general media—in almost all exchanges—and these are called money.

Since the general medium of exchange emerged from a wide range of commodities, money is a commodity. Again, according to Rothbard,

Money is not an abstract unit of account, divorceable from a concrete good; it is not a useless token only good for exchanging; it is not a ‘claim on society’; it is not a guarantee of a fixed price level. It is simply a commodity.

Moreover, in the words of Mises, “…an object cannot be used as money unless, at the moment when its use as money begins, it already possesses an objective exchange value based on some other use.” Why must this be the case? Rothbard explains further,

In contrast to directly-used consumers’ or producers’ goods, money must have pre-existing prices on which to ground a demand. But the only way this can happen is by beginning with a useful commodity under barter, and then adding demand for a medium to the previous demand for direct use (e.g., for ornaments, in the case of gold).

Hence, money is that for which all other goods and services are traded. Through an ongoing selection process over thousands of years, people settled on gold as money. In today’s monetary system, the money supply is no longer gold, but coins and notes issued by the government and the central bank. This fiat-money still has exchange-value because of its prior connection with true money and the inertia caused by the fact that it is already accepted as a general medium of exchange. Consequently, coins and notes still constitute money, known as cash, which are employed in transactions. Goods and services are exchanged for cash.

Individuals keep their money either in their wallets, under their mattresses, in safety deposit boxes, or stored—deposited—in banks. In depositing money, a person never relinquishes ownership over it. When Joe stores his money with a bank, he continues to have an unlimited claim against it and is entitled to take charge of it at any time. Consequently, these deposits—labeled demand-deposits—form part of money.

At any point, part of the stock of cash is stored, that is, deposited in banks. Thus, in an economy, if people hold $10,000 in cash, the money supply of this economy is $10,000. But if some individuals have stored $2,000 in demand-deposits the total money supply will remain $10,000—$8,000 cash and $2,000 in demand-deposits with banks. Should all individuals deposit their entire stock of cash with banks, then the total money supply would remain $10,000—all of it held as demand deposits.

This must be contrasted with a credit transaction. Credit always involves the creditor’s purchase of a future good in exchange for a present good. As a result, in a credit transaction, money is transferred from a lender to a borrower. Such transactions include savings-deposits. These are, in fact, loans to the bank. With these deposits, the lender of money relinquishes to the bank his claim over the money for the duration of the loan. These credit transactions (i.e., loans), however, do not alter the money supply in the economy. If Bob lends $1,000 to Joe, the money is transferred from Bob’s demand-deposit or from Bob’s wallet to Joe’s possession.

Electronic money

Does electronic money change this? Electronic money is not money as such, but a particular way of using existing money. For instance, by means of electronic devices Bob can transfer $1,000 to Joe. He could also transfer the $1,000 by means of a check written against his deposit in Bank A. Joe, in turn, can place the check with his bank—Bank B. After the clearance, the money will be transferred from Bob’s demand-deposit in Bank A to Joe’s demand-deposit in Bank B. Note that all these transfers—either electronically or by means of checks—can take place because the $1,000 in cash physically exists. Without the existence of the $1,000, nothing can be transferred.

Now, if Bob pays for his groceries with a credit card, he in fact borrows from the credit card company, such as MasterCard. For instance, if he buys $100 worth of groceries using MasterCard, then MasterCard pays the grocer $100. Bob, in turn, repays his debt to MasterCard. Again, all this could not have happened without the prior existence of cash. After all, what exactly has been transferred?

The fact that cash per se was not used in the above example doesn’t mean that we don’t require it any longer. On the contrary, the fact that it exists enables various forms of transactions to take place via sophisticated technology such as digital transfers. These various forms of transfer are not money as such but simply a particular way of transferring money. The medium of exchange is still cash—just the means of transferring that cash is different in a digital world.

What about the introduction of a digital currency by the central bank? Could this replace cash? Arguably, this would not make the digital currency the accepted medium of exchange. To become money, a thing has to undergo the market-selection process. It cannot become money because the central bank said so. If the authorities were to force upon individuals the digital currency, then individuals are likely to utilize some other things as money. If the government were to apply vicious regulations, then this is likely to destroy the market economy.

The removal of cash is going to harm the market economy

Any attempt to remove cash—money—implies the abolition of the market-selected medium of exchange and, ultimately, the market economy. The introduction of money came about because barter was inefficient. Hence, in the absence of money (i.e., the medium of exchange), the market economy could not emerge. Those commentators that advocate phasing out cash unwittingly advocate the destruction of the market economy and moving humanity towards the dark ages.

The argument that removing cash will eliminate tax evasion and crime is doubtful. Tax evasion would be reduced if the incentives for it—high taxes based on big government—were removed. The fact that during an economic crisis people run to the banks to withdraw their money indicates that they have likely lost faith in the fractional-reserve banking system and would like to have their money back.

Conclusion

Irrespective of the level of technological advancement of the economy, money is that against which we exchange goods and services. Therefore, any policy that is aimed at phasing out cash runs the risk of destroying the market economy.

Originally Posted at https://mises.org/

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In the glorious age of the Kamala Ascendency, the TSA is no longer restraining its contempt for American travelers. After squeezing millions of butts and boobs and never catching a terrorist, TSA decided to have fun by taunting its victims.

After a traveler asked online, “Why does TSA need social media anyways?” TSA’s Instagram account taunted: “Idk Kyle, why do your friends keep bringing stuff they shouldn’t in their carry-on?” Almost 40,000 people liked that post (slightly fewer than the total number of TSA employees).

The TSA Instagram team added another smack at travelers who failed to devote their lives to pleasing federal agents: “You see how we don’t have 20 different things shoved in our pockets before airport security? Very cutesy, very demure.” Obviously, any American who does not approach a TSA checkpoint stripped down like a convict entering a prison shower bears all the blame for whatever problems he causes.

TSA officials pirouetted as if they had the moral high ground. But TSA has perennially relied on idiotic seizure statistics in lieu of competently protecting the American public.

A 2003 TSA press release proudly announced that it had “intercepted more than 4.8 million prohibited items at passenger security checkpoints in its first year, contributing to the security of the traveling public and the nation’s 429 commercial airports.” TSA chief James Loy bragged to a congressional committee: “We have identified, intercepted, and therefore kept off aircraft more than 4.8 million dangerous items.”

Except that TSA is Idiocy Incarnate. Every fingernail clipper that the TSA seized from a hapless grandmother became proof that the federal government is protecting people better than ever. TSA checkpoint seizures included frying pans, dumbbell sets, horseshoes, and toy robots—all of which presumably would have been used to carry out suicidal hijackings. Covert government tests showed TSA screeners were utterly inept at detecting firearms and mock bombs.

I have been snared by TSA’s changing and boneheaded rules for cigar cutters. In 2018, I was flying out of Washington National Airport, heading to a Mises conference. A slack-jawed TSA dweeb came up after my checkpoint screening and he gleefully announced: “Your bag triggered an alarm—we have to search it.”

I followed him to a special area off to the side for bag searches. The dude starts going through my bag, pushing underwear and socks and a lonely necktie aside but finding no Uzis. Then, in one of the bag’s side flaps, this aspiring Sherlock Holmes reached in and plucked out a grave danger to safe aviation.

“You aren’t allowed to take cigar cutters on carry-on,” he announced with the air of an elementary school cafeteria monitor catching a kid who filched an extra donut.

“TSA’s website says explicitly that cutters are allowed on carry-on.” I had done my due diligence pre-flight. This particular cutter was a cheap plastic device with two tiny medal blades that sliced together like a guillotine.

“Uh… no. You aren’t allowed to take this onboard.”

“TSA at other airports has never prohibited cigar cutters.”

“We have strict rules here. It doesn’t matter what the rules are at other airports.”

“What harm could it do?”

“It has a sharp edge.”

“Do you think I’m going to use it to break into the cockpit and circumcise the pilot?”

He just stared and kept breathing through his mouth.

I threw up my arms: “Fine—take it—I have a flight to catch.”

After getting out of sight of that checkpoint, I popped open my carry-on bag and confirmed that the TSA wizard missed my back-up cigar cutter.

No shameless emotional string-pulling would be complete without a canine cameo. On Monday, [8/26], TSA announced the winner of its 2024 Cutest Canine Contest Winner—a dog named Barni who sniffs in the San Francisco airport.

But TSA failed to mention the role that its dogs have in plundering any traveler who is caught with more than $5,000 in cash—the magic threshold for feds considering money “suspicious.” Most American currency has micro-traces of narcotics, and a stack of bills usually suffices for a positive alert from a drug sniffing dog—thus entitling the feds to commandeer the cash. Dan Alban, a savvy Institute for Justice attorney, observed: “This is something that we know is happening all across the United States. We’ve been contacted by people who have been traveling to buy used cars or buy equipment for their business and had their cash seized.”

If TSA wants to set a record for social media likes, it should craft a meme with a Monty Python-style witch drowning to illustrate TSA’s devotion to the Fifth Amendment and private property rights.

But TSA is positively gloating nowadays over its latest high-profile seizure campaign. “Peanut Butter is a liquid. We said what we said,” declared the TSA Twitter account last week, sounding like Moses on Mt. Sinai announcing a supplement to the Ten Commandments. And since TSA claims that peanut butter is a liquid, it can effectively confiscate any jar it sees people have in carry-on luggage. TSA’s Instagram account last week posted a photo of the U.S. Olympic team in the rain on a boat and labeled it, “TSA’s social media team on our way to explain why peanut butter is a liquid.” TSA offered mock heroics in lieu of common sense.

I got snared by that bone-headed rule when I was flying out of Dallas last November. After the x-ray sounded an alert, a beefy young female agent hoisted my bag and carted it to the end of the checkpoint area. She summoned me to explain its contents and my depravity. “Is there anything sharp in this bag?”

“No,” I replied.

She unzipped my bag and began pawing through it. In lieu of a machete, she found a small half-full jar of peanut butter. “You can’t take liquids on a flight,” she announced solemnly.

“It’s peanut butter. It’s not liquid.”

“It’s liquid and it’s prohibited,” was her decree. Did TSA covertly classify peanut butter as a bioweapon, or what?

“Ya, whatever,” I said as I abandoned the jar to federal custody. I’d had worse losses on earlier trips.

Chatting with another jaded traveler as I put my boots back after clearing the Dallas checkpoint, he asked if I was upset about losing my peanut butter.

I smiled: “I’ll settle accounts with TSA later.”

Plenty of irate travelers settled accounts with TSA on Twitter after it posted its pompous decree on peanut butter as a liquid.

@gaborgurbacs replied, “You can demonstrate it by drinking a bottle. Post the video.” @la_smartine retorted, “You meant ‘is a bomb’. You’re welcome.”

@amitylee13 groused, “Your agency has exceeded its expiration date, unlike my peanut butter you stole from me.”

@_GlenGarry  tweeted, “Peanut Butter won’t invade your privacy or assault you in public spaces.”

@ErikVoorhees replied, “Thanks for keeping Americans safe from peanut butter.”

@BecketAdams scoffed that TSA was “a permanent DMV for airports staffed by peanut butter-drinking perverts.”

@DrCarolLow warned, “They’ll steal your yogurt as well.”

@NHpilled snarked, “No wonder you guys have failed 90-95% of your b0mb tests.”

Some Twitter users thumped the arbitrariness of the rule—since people can load as much peanut butter as they please onto a sandwich and march unmolested through TSA checkpoints. As @thisone0verhere  scoffed, “Peanuts are not [liquid] so I will see you and my new portable food processor on my next flight.”

The latest controversies are a reminder of the deluge of substitute agency names for that TSA acronym—“Too Stupid for Arby’s,” “Tear Suitcase Apart,” “Thousands Standing Around,” “Take Scissors Away,” “Total Sexual Assault,” “They Steal Anything,” “Tactics to Suppress Accountability,” and “Three Stooges Audition.”

If TSA’s social media team wants to be marginally less useless, they should sponsor a contest for better substitute names for TSA.

Originally Posted at https://mises.org/

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Dr. Robert Malone’s recent Mises University talk, PsyWar: Enforcing the New World Order, raises important and timely questions about advanced mass psychological manipulation capabilities being weaponized by globalized corporatists through what he calls the “surveillance capitalism,” practiced by firms like Amazon, Google and Facebook. These firms sell highly-detailed personal data that facilitates things like targeted advertising, advocacy journalism, online trolling, censorship, and deplatforming for large-scale manipulation of individual beliefs, values, and feelings, and for waging “fifth generation warfare” against domestic and foreign adversaries of the NATO states.

Does this new, personal, data-driven authoritarianism extract value from individuals against their will and use it to rob them of their autonomy? How do Austrian economists incorporate such assaults on individuality into their praxeological analysis of society?

The notion that psychological manipulation can nullify individual autonomy is far from new. In the 1890s, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim argued that one’s beliefs and values are largely shaped by the influence of others and not by one’s own experience, so that purposefulness is allegedly vested in the “collective consciousness” of a society and not in the separate minds of individuals who compose it. In the early 1920s, Walter Lippman and Edward Bernays extended this irrationalist theory of cultural determinism by arguing for the feasibility of propaganda experts systematically manipulating a culture by using non-rational rhetoric that exploits authority figures, stereotypes, and emotionally-charged words and imagery in their messaging. It was Bernays who originally coined the phrase “psychological warfare” in connection with his World War I propaganda efforts on behalf of the Committee on Public Information (CPI). Lippman, who had lobbied President Woodrow Wilson to create the CPI in 1917, two decades later went on to assist British intelligence in its highly successful covert propaganda campaign to discredit opponents of American intervention in World War II. Both Lippman and Bernays practiced what they preached.

In 1958, John Kenneth Galbraith explored the economic implications of the Lippman-Bernays model of psychological manipulation in his book The Affluent Society. He noted that, with the power to shape consumer tastes, private businesses are incentivized to manufacture artificial consumer desires via commercial advertising, inducing consumers becoming more affluent in terms of material goods than their rational self-interest requires. Among Austrian economists, Murray Rothbard objected to Galbraith’s claims about the manufacturing of artificial consumer desires in his treatise Man, Economy, and State. Rothbard’s trenchant critique of Galbraithian affluence theory provides a significant starting point for how Austrian economists can address Malone’s questions and address the claims of the cultural determinists.

Rothbard emphasized that persuasion is necessarily a voluntary process—the target of advertising must voluntarily choose to adopt the ideas for advertising or other propaganda to work. He further pointed out that marketing research, for example, would be pointless unless advertisers were interested in catering to desires that exist independently of their own psychological manipulations. In a “psywar” context, Rothbard’s observation regarding market research applies to the market for personal data harvested by Big Tech firms—it is precisely because individuals have behavioral characteristics that aren’t manufactured by propagandists that data about those characteristics becomes valuable to propagandists.

It is still the individual actor who ranks possible courses of action and acts upon those rankings. One might add that the availability of any personal data that aids in the crafting of a more persuasive message is also a function of a voluntary waiver of privacy. If a propagandist’s influence happens to warp his target’s perceptions of reality and derails the target’s pursuit of happiness in the propagandist’s own interest, it is not because the target has been mysteriously robbed of his or her autonomy. Contrary to Durkheim, every action is still guided by an individual mind, not by a mere cell in some collective hive-mind.

Given the voluntariness of persuasion, we must reframe the key “psywar” questions as: why have so many people become so gullible and so unconcerned about their own privacy in the age of social media? Why, in the new social media world of compromised privacy, has it become so much easier to influence people into accepting new beliefs and values that are contrary to their own rational self-interest?

One way to address these questions is with a thymological understanding of human behavior, enabling one to infer that the application of rationality to the formation of beliefs and values is not automatic for human individuals, but is itself an act of will. This, in turn, suggests that the new big data technologies are making it easier to detect and exploit pre-existing irrational prejudices and to reward willful irrationality, altering the natural disposition favored by the innate features of one’s emotional responses.

While economics doesn’t specify how goals are formulated, an independent ability to formulate goals must, as Rothbard noted, logically precede any attempt to influence the goals of others. While cultural determinists presume a deep distrust of the ability of individuals to keep themselves grounded in their own humanity and in a realistic understanding of their own circumstances in the face of social pressures. Of course, they beg the question of how they themselves, and any propaganda technicians following their advice, are supposed to transcend such limitations. Propaganda can only work when its targets choose not to reason about it or filter it using more fundamental principles that are grounded in reason.

If a propagandist can build a personalized profile of an individual’s intellectual weaknesses and craft messages to exploit them, such circumvention might be made more effective. Even worse, if individuals are indoctrinated to embrace irrationality as a part of their “education,” then (as Dr. Malone observed) these “educated” people will be even more susceptible to the influence of propaganda than the relatively undereducated “deplorables.” Not only crony internet firms, but government-controlled schools too have a lot to do with the contemporary trend towards increased susceptibility to manipulation.

Another way to address these questions is with the economic inference that one can’t benefit reliably from information derived from other people’s rationality and experiences whenever a monopolistic “gatekeeper” stands in the way. Such gatekeepers are incentivized to manufacture and selectively amplify falsehoods that better suit the gatekeeper’s interests, while preventing dissenting truth-tellers from being heard. What Dr. Malone calls “surveillance capitalism” is better described as “surveillance corporatism,” where selective subsidies, threats of regulation, immunities from lawsuits, and discrimination by privileged financial and investment firms favors government-compliant gatekeepers over competitors who happen to offer more privacy and/or fewer restrictions on speech. Interventionism has helped create the internet environment that is so hostile to privacy and to dissenting speech.

What manipulative “psywar” techniques boil down to is centralizing control over the flow of information and undermining the confidence that individuals have in using their own faculties to sense, feel, think, and act for themselves. Dr. Malone’s observations about attempts by elites to engineer free-floating anxiety, a sense of unreality, a hypnotic adherence to charismatic authority figures, etc., on a global scale in connection with the Covid pandemic response speak directly to these points.

However, we have also witnessed widespread grass-roots opposition to “psywar” narratives and censorship emerging, some of it inspired by Dr. Malone himself when he famously broadcast his observations about “mass formation” on Joe Rogan’s podcast. The good news is that the self-evident truth of each person’s purposefulness implies that each of us still has the power to keep our own beliefs and values anchored in our own rational understanding of the world, regardless of whatever nonsense we are fed. The empirical evidence that points to censorship and gaslighting have not become universal yet, let alone having spawned a global backlash.

Looking forward to a society based on liberty and peacefully-acquired ownership rights, such widespread threats to privacy and free speech aren’t likely to arise. Market competition may incentivize profit-seeking businesses to create internet services that better promote our free speech and privacy. To be sure, free competition by itself is not an ironclad guarantee against malignant influence. Falsehoods—whether manufactured by propagandists serving their own interests or spontaneously arising and propagating through a process of cultural evolution—will always be competing against truths that spring from one’s own intellect, from truth-tellers combatting the falsehoods, or from received traditions that happen to reflect the reasoned wisdom of prior generations.

It is still up to each individual actor to take an active role in continually improving their own beliefs and evaluative principles, always honing their generation of ex ante utility scales to better optimize their ex post experiences of satisfaction. The ultimate responsibility for guarding against deception and manipulation and for achieving such personal moral progress rests with each individual. First, one must understand and cherish open, rational discourse and selective disclosures of personal information before markets can properly align information flows to one’s needs.

Originally Posted at https://mises.org/

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